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Been Reading

Interview with {C.M. McCoy} + Giveaway

Don’t you f-ing quit. And if you feel like quitting, email me for an e-slap. They’re free on Tuesdays. ~ C.M. McCoy

I’m super excited to introduce C.M. McCoy. She just released Eerie, a new adult paranormal adventure with a side of sweet romance. In the midst of all her crazy-busy-new-release days, she agreed to do a little interview.

Hiya, C.M., so glad to have you. Tell us a little about you. How did you get to where you are today?

Hi Bokerah (am I saying that right?) Thanks so much for reaching out to me and can I just say—I am more than a little bit in love with your hair. Seriously. You’ve inspired me to try a Northern Lights look during my next hair appointment. I’ll send you a photo.

Right now, I’m sitting in Alaska, but I didn’t start here. I was born and raised in a town just north of Pittsburgh. Long story short—after college, I joined the military, where I met this really cool guy who convinced me to live with him in the Last Frontier.

As for the journey from Air Force engineer to author… Well there’s a story best told over a few shots of whiskey.

I actually wrote a memoir before I wrote Eerie, which my non-fiction agent, Sharleen Martin, is shopping. In several ways, Eerie grew out of my memoir experience. I’d always enjoyed writing and telling stories, but it wasn’t until after I’d submitted my memoir to Sharleen that I felt confident enough to tackle a novel. The story itself had been rolling around in my head for a couple years. I knew the characters. I knew the world. I knew the story. So much so, that it felt like writing a memoir when it came out. The only (actually it was HUGE) difference was envisioning the history, thoughts, and feelings of each and every character so that their behavior and dialogue weaved logically and smoothly into the story. In memoir, that part is easy: the other “characters” are already drawn.

What followed was the long, arduous road to publishing, which is all too familiar to other writers, and I did cry over my hundreds (yes hundreds) of rejections.

This week, I finished reading Eerie. It’s a wonderfully creative take on the paranormal. I loved the humor. The funny bits nearly always caught me by surprise, but always made me love your heroine, Hailey Hartley, that much more. How did you come up with the pseudo-science behind the university studies and the happenings on campus?

Wow. Thank you! I’m glad you got the humor, because I was cracking myself up writing Hailey. Literally, I’d be in a full-on maniacal belly laugh, tears streaming down my face as I wrote. Hailey has a wonderful sense of humor, and it’s a good thing. I imagine she’d have gone insane without it after what I put her through.

Remember the X-Files? I LOVED that show. It came out when I was a young teen, and I so wanted to be Scully, investigating the unusual happenings in this world, armed with skepticism, science, and reason… I think watching that show planted a very strange seed in my imagination, and at some point I began to wonder: what if paranormal things were not only real, but accepted in society and seriously studied as a discipline. Like geology. Or medicine. And wouldn’t it be intriguing if that paranormal world existed as a sect in our normal society? Not necessarily out in the open, but not necessarily hidden either. Hence Bear Towne University, an accredited institution with a college of ParaScience located in The Middle of Nowhere, Alaska.

There’s a unique structure to the Envoys, their servants, and how they interact with humans. Is this something you built after mentally creating the college, or did that spiritual / paranormal hierarchy come first?

The Envoys came first. Actually, it was a love story that came first. And in exploring Asher’s history to build his character, I realized he wasn’t the type of creature that would just live in a house, twiddling his thumbs, stalking a poor human girl. That must sound silly, but when I really dug in to his life, I realized he had an intense motivation to get back home. And having been trapped on Earth for 3,000 years, he would have done something hugely constructive to achieve that goal. Like build an entire university dedicated to tearing the barrier between this world and the afterlife.

How did you come up with Mooseltoe, Yeti spray, or the roommate from hell? Where did all those quirky details that made Bear Towne shine.

Ha! Mooseltoe is real. I didn’t come up with it. There’s some hanging from the light above our dining room table right now. I’ll send you some. I was “introduced” to it when I moved to this strange place called Alaska. Yeti spray is simply concentrated bear spray, also something that might sound strange to folks in the lower 48 (maybe not in bear country). I remember the first time I went camping in Alaska, and my husband shoved a canister of bear spray in my hand. I thought, “Really? I’ll take the gun, thank you.” In fact all of the quirky details about Bear Towne University arose from my “culture shock” in moving to Alaska, especially the mosquitoes and even the Luftzeug.

As for the roommate… Who hasn’t had a roommate from Hell?

Do you listen to music while you write? Did you have a soundtrack for Eerie?

Funny thing is I made a playlist for an angsty love story years before I actually sat down to write Eerie, and there is a soundtrack. It’s on my YouTube channel and features quite a bit of Evanescence.

As you know, I’m a beginning writer. What sort of advice would you give to other newbie writers out there?

Don’t you f-ing quit. And if you feel like quitting, email me for an e-slap. They’re free on Tuesdays.

About Eerie: Hailey’s dreams have always been, well…vivid. As in monsters from her nightmares follow her into her waking life vivid.

When her big sister goes missing, eighteen-year-old Hailey finds the only thing keeping her safe from a murderous 3,000-year-old beast is an equally terrifying creature who has fallen “madly” in love with her. Competing to win her affection, the Dream Creature, Asher, lures her to the one place that offers safety–a ParaScience university in Alaska he calls home. There, she studies the science of the supernatural and must learn to live with a roommate from Hell, survive her ParaScience classes, and hope the only creature who can save her from an evil immortal doesn’t decide to kill her himself.

I just purchased Eerie on my Nook and am loving Hailey’s story. Colleen, you are inspiration to me, reading the many rejections you went through and now you have an awesome book published. Thanks for being a wonderful mentor to me for NOQS and good luck with your book.

Not sure my first comment made it on here, but I love Eerie, Colleen. I just started reading it and I’m hooked. Congratulations and much success with Eerie. It’s awesome to read that you have found success after early rejections. It gives hope to all of us out here, trying to find representation and have our books published. Thanks so much for being my mentor for NOQS.

Hi Kirizar! For me the non-romance parts were easy. As Romance Writers of America have informed me, Eerie is NOT a romance. So I guess the romance was the toughest, because everybody’s idea of romance is so different. I went in knowing I wanted a ParaScience university in Alaska, and the world-building, though it took months, was super-fun and came easily.

As for the character development, it went like this: Asher (Eerie’s “hero”) sprouted first, followed quickly by Cobon (the villain). Cobon was probably my easiest character to write, because I knew his motivation and personality from the beginning, whereas Asher and especially Hailey were more difficult to figure out. In fact, I was over 100 pages in to writing the story before I realized who Hailey was, and I went back and rewrote the beginning (actually, I rewrote many scenes) several times to get her right and consistent. Eerie’s other hero, Fin, appeared out of nowhere, and he had such a strong personality, I had to make him a main character.

Yes, thank you. I find it a struggle to get past the initial ‘falling-in-love’ with my characters and world building stage, to get to the gruesome excavation of slag to find some nugget of gold in what I’ve written. I have to engineer backwards to see what I forgot, like, oh say, a plot or a villain. It’s interesting to see how other writers approach it.